1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to compound contents delivery method and delivery system, and more particularly to compound contents delivery method and delivery system suitable for use in a portable-terminal-oriented streaming system or a system designed to carry out the portable-terminal-oriented network picture editing.
2) Description of the Related Art
In recent years, with the development of network environments such as the internet, efforts have been in progress to construct a system which carries out the information interchange or information offer between computers connected to a network.
For example, the employment of SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) enables offering the compound contents (or content) for arranging a presentation through partial reference and time series combination of a plurality of contents distributed to a plurality of servers on a network. For example, such compound contents are made by means of digest-editing in which a plurality of motion picture files or a plurality of audio files are partially connected to each other.
An offer service on the aforesaid compound contents is an information offer service to common personal computers. Meanwhile, with the rapid progress of the construction of a system which carries out the information offer to portable terminals, a further requirement for the offer to portable terminals is on the increase.
However, for delivering compound contents to a portable terminal, there is a need to convert the contents as an information source to be managed in a server on a network into a data format to which the portable terminal can make reference.
That is, in comparison with a common personal computer, the portable terminal has a smaller data size processible                as image data and the like and employs a different encoding method, and for the regeneration of most of personal-computer-oriented contents in the portable terminal, there is a need to make a conversion on the encoding method and others.        
In addition, simultaneously with this, for making partial reference to the multimedia contents in which information (media) with various forms, such as character, still picture, motion picture and voice, are integrated with each other while keeping the time arrangement, there is a need to extract a time zone to which reference is made with respect to this multimedia contents.
FIG. 22 is an illustration of an example of a compound contents delivery system 100 designed to offer compound contents to portable terminals as mentioned above. In FIG. 22, the compound contents delivery system 100 is made up of a contents server 101, a converting apparatus 103, a management server 102 and a portable terminal 104.
In this configuration, the contents server 101 includes a contents storage unit 101a for storing the contents, and a control unit 101b for controlling the fetching of the contents from the contents storage unit 101a on the basis of a delivery request.
The management server 102 is connected through a network 100a to the portable terminal 104 to manage the delivery of the contents to the portable terminal 104 and is made to instruct the converting apparatus 103 of the substance of the compound contents, to be produced, through the use of conversion instruction information.
The converting apparatus 103 is connected through a network 100b to the contents server 101 and locally connected to the management server 102 for mediating the supply of the contents from the contents server 101 to the management server 102, and is composed of a local storage unit 103a and a control unit 103b. 
That is, the control unit 103b of the converting apparatus 103 once puts, on the basis of conversion instruction information from the management server 102, a plurality of kinds (in FIG. 22, n+1 kinds from #1 to #n+1) of integrated contents including a time zone to be delivered to the portable terminal 104 from the contents server 101 in the local storage unit 103a. 
Moreover, after the partial contents are extracted from the time zone to be referenced and the conversion is made on the data format, the partial contents are time-combined to produce compound contents which in turn, are stored as one file in the local storage unit 103a. The file forming the compound contents is transferred through the management server 102 to the portable terminal 104, thereby delivering the compound contents to the portable terminal 104.
That is, in the contents delivery system 100 shown in FIG. 22, the contents to be referenced in the portable terminal 104, together with a portion to be non-referenced, are picked up through the network 100b and, through the local processing in the converting apparatus 103, the time zone to be referred is then extracted and the conversion of the encoding format is made, thereby storing it in one file.
Among the conventional documents related to the present invention, there are Japanese Patent Laid-Open Nos. 2002-297495, 2000-235652 and HEI 10-254850.
However, in the aforesaid system shown in FIG. 22, in a case in which the contents are fetched by the converting apparatus 103, since the non-referenced portion is together picked up and the time zone of the contents to be referenced is extracted in the converting apparatus 103, there is a problem in that the uselessness occurs in the network transmission. That is, there is a need to fetch the contents including the non-referenced time zone from the server forming the location of the information service, which causes the useless network transmission.
On the other hand, as the techniques for fetching only the portion to be referenced, there have been known two means of NFS (data acquisition according to file offset) and streaming C/S processing (data acquisition according to time designation). However, these techniques is not designed to make the conversion of the encoding format and the like and, hence, difficulty is experienced in making the conversion of the encoding format and the like for the regeneration in a portable terminal.
In general, the personal-computer-oriented motion picture contents have a high fineness (high rate) while the motion picture regenerable in the portable terminal is comparatively at a low rate and, hence, the converting apparatus 103 is required to convert the high-rate data transmitted through the network 100b into low-rate data. Therefore, even if the contents server 101 fetches only the referenced portion through the use of the aforesaid technique, since the transmission of the high-rate data non-regenerated in the portable terminal takes place, there is still a problem in that the useless network transmission occurs.
The aforesaid documents do not provide a technique of solving the uselessness of the network transmission mentioned above.
Moreover, since the contents conversion processing is locally conducted, if the compound contents delivery requests from a plurality of portable terminals 104 concentrate, the processing load in the converting apparatus 103 increases.
Still moreover, in a case in which the conversion requests occurs for the same delivery data, there is a need to store the contents fetched from the contents server 101 as a file every time before conducting the contents conversion processing, which further increases the processing load in the converting apparatus 103.